Truth in the Blood
by Selonianth
Summary: Something Solomon says on the lawn of the Zoo and it rings in Saya's head showing her the truth. The Truth in the Blood.


Saya stared across the green grassy expanse that separated her from her sister and Solomon, her sister's chevalier. She couldn't have heard Solomon right, he'd said something about how Amshel, the chevalier from Russia, was the true reason for everything that had happened since she'd released Diva from the Zoo's Tower, with the probable exception of the murder of those who lived there and Saya was finding it hard to actually fault her sapphire eyed twin for the massacre.

Her sister had, after all, been locked up for fifty years at that point and there was really no way of knowing what tortures she had undergone in that state. "Nothing that has happened was Diva's idea?"

Solomon shook his head, Diva giggling, "Amshel has been making me happy... but he also makes me go to all kinds of doctors. I don't like doctors!"

Saya was about to throw out the hope she'd found that maybe, just maybe, Diva was innocent of the crimes she'd been accused of when Diva finished and Saya understood. A flicker of a face in Saya's memory confused her for a moment before she remembered, "Amshel... he was here, all that time ago." Rage began to fill the red queen and she looked up from the ground at the pair, eyes glowing dangerous red, Solomon transforming his hand back into a blade.

"I hope you don't mean to continue fighting, you're too weak," His infuriatingly even voice spoke.

Saya took a breath and calmed herself, her boiling rage calming to a simmer, "Diva... my sister... my twin doesn't need to fear me, and not," She paused to blur to the rear of Diva, a step behind and just to the right, "Because I'm weak."

Saya could almost feel Diva's shock that Saya was suddenly faster than she could follow. Raising a hand she gently laid it on her sister's shoulder, "I'm sorry Diva. I should have taken you out of that cell myself... I should have listened when you tried to talk to me after you killed Joel. Most importantly, I should have killed Amshel Goldsmith a long, long time ago."

Diva turned and Saya was shocked to see genuine tears in her sister's deep-blue eyes, "You really mean that?"

Saya smiled sadly and nodded, noticing Solomon backing away slowly, his blade-hand transforming back to a human appearance. "I really do. I know I couldn't have understood back then, I was... I was too human. You had just killed all I had ever known and I was too human, too shocked, to listen to you. I've never wanted to hunt you Diva, it always felt wrong to me. I love you too much to want you dead, but I convinced myself it was what I needed to do to save the world from you."

"I love you too nee-sama," Diva sobbed, shocking Solomon who had never seen his queen in anything other than a foul mood over not having something she wanted, or an extremely short happy-mood over having what she had desired. Not this... happiness. Then Diva shocked both by kissing Saya on the lips in a deep and passionate kiss.

"Whah?" Saya spoke, her eyes slightly glazed over, as the kiss broke, her eye's fading back to their dull brownish red color in her shock.

Diva smirked, "I've always wanted to do that to my dear sister. Stuffy humans made her all prudish though, did she like it?" the blue eyed chiropteran queen asked.

Saya nodded before her brain kicked in and she could stop herself causing Diva to squeal in happiness. "Hold on!" Diva froze staring at her sister. "I did like it... but I still have something I need to do before anything else. I need to kill Amshel. Solomon, get my sister away from this place."

Diva started to pout, her eyes watering before Saya smiled and placed a hand on her twin's cheek. "Don't worry Diva. I will be there shortly, I will find you no matter where you are. First I have to kill the man who still thinks my sister is his personal experiment."

Solomon started to protest but the glare from Saya's chiropteran glowing eyes quieted his objections. This was the being who had killed so many of his brothers, and of the lesser bestial chiropterans. This was the being who killed him if he tried to stop her. He could only pray Amshel didn't suffer too much for his crimes.

His decision was ratified when Diva smiled and kissed her sister again, still on the lips before she turned to Solomon, "Well? Let's go! I don't want my sister distracted when she fights him."

First Solomon needed to know something, "Diva... have you known the entire time?"

Diva nodded slowly, "At first I wasn't strong enough to hurt him myself and didn't want to be alone. Then he had me make you, and James, and Karl but then sister was hunting me and I was afraid that if I asked you and the others to fight him that you'd lose and even if you killed him too I'd still be alone, all alone."

Saya stroked her sister's back before Solomon wrapped his arms around her and grew his wings to fly off. She turned her senses outward, feeling and sensing for the man who had continued her sister's emotional torment just by being near her, who had exploited and experimented using her. Finding him she turned and was about to run in that direction when she felt Haji and the others closing in on her. Disappearing in a flicker she appeared right in front of them.

"Saya! How did you do that?!" Kai asked startled.

Saya looked at Riku and was angrier than before. If Amshel hadn't done what he had to Diva's mind, and if she hadn't failed her sister in the first place that never would have happened. Still, she was focused enough to answer his question, "It's easy once I remember what I am. Haji, protect them. There's a chevalier I have to kill, then we need to talk."

Haji nodded, as stoic as ever, "If that is what you wish."

"Saya! Saya!?" Kai cried as she turned and flickered again, vanishing utterly from sight on her way to intercept, and kill, Amshel Goldsmith.

David was the first to speak, still carrying Riku. "Haji, do you know what she's talking about?"

Haji thought for a moment, debating whether or not it was his right to tell Saya's story because he too could sense the other chevalier now that he was looking. "It started here, over a hundred years ago, before the fire. There was a scientist who worked here by the name of Amshel Goldsmith, a branch family of the Goldschmidt's who owned this property, and a distant nephew of Joel Goldschmidt the first. He was the one who administered to Diva in her tower and likely is the one who experimented on her. I thought him dead in the fire and massacre until the Siberian Express, he was the chiropteran who took Liza's form."

The others stared in the direction Saya had gone, "Can she win?"

Haji turned back to them, "Now that she has remembered who she is, and is allowing her chiropteran nature to come to the fore... yes. She can."

"Do you mean to say she couldn't possibly win without becoming a monster?!" Kai shouted, earning a harsh glare from Haji.

Haji's voice, while even, somehow echoed with annoyance at Kai. He'd long kept his tongue in check while his friend and queen could not remember herself but he would not tolerate the comments that, should she hear them, would utterly destroy his queen. "Do not pretend to understand what it is to be chiropteran. For her food will never suffice to energize her, emotions lead to harsher more instinctual responses, a life doomed to watch any human she might come to care for age and die while she remains young and beautiful. She is no more a monster than you are. She is a predator, nothing more, nothing less. Even now your brother is being transformed at a genetic level into a lesser form of her. Into a being who will never grow hungry, never sleep, never age, and never die unless in combat. Into a monster just like her."

Kai looked as if he had been slapped in the face.

"Haji..." Louis began but Haji turned to look at him and his words died in his throat.

Haji's voice was not angry with Louis, but it was definitely commanding, "He does not understand the world he finds himself in and continues to demand that the world conform to what he thought he knew about it before everything happened. My only concern is Saya, her physical, emotional, and mental health are all that concern me. It's time he came to understand that we do not hunt Diva because we wish the end of chiropterans, we hunt Diva because she is a danger to the world. If she were to no longer be such a danger, we would stop. It is as simple as that."

David nodded, he'd understood that from the beginning. The pair had said something similar in the past, it was in Joel's Diary. "And what of Diva? Is she still here?"

"Saya let her go without fighting after she released her power and came here before heading after Amshel," Haji answered.

David nodded in sudden understanding, "She must blame Amshel for Diva's transgressions since the Zoo. Do you know if she's correct to think that?"

Haji hesitated, "I am... unsure. I know that Amshel is a scientist with little value for life, that much was clear to me even before I became Saya's chevalier and the destruction of the Zoo. It is... not beyond the realm of possibility that he is the cause of the bestial chiropterans that have plagued humanity in the recent century." Turning his head he felt Saya's power ignite as she engaged in combat.

Saya's eyes could only be described as twin pools of rage as she channelled all of her anger, and fear, and guilt into her attacks on Amshel Goldsmith.

The hundred and twenty year old chevalier was stunned to see how quickly Saya had grown to match, nay, exceed Diva's own abilities. Diva was dangerous in one of her fits, but she didn't have the raw combat skill and talent that the classically trained, and extremely blooded, Saya did. Nor the raw desire to rip him limb from limb and his own lack of combat experience was showing. He was on the defensive, even after transforming and trying to fly.

Saya hadn't even let him get a foot off the ground before she had blurred to behind his back and taken his wings from him with two swift swings of her sword. He was lucky she hadn't used her blood or he'd be dead even now.

Amshel was horrified to notice that she'd never once blooded her sword during her attacks on him. It wasn't because she was in a berserker rage, she was absurdly clearheaded despite her rage. Nor was it because she wanted him alive, no one attacking like her wanted anything more than the head of their oppo- And just like that he realized what she wanted. She didn't want to crystalize him, it would be all too easy for the enraged queen. She wanted to kill him in such a way as to never be refuted that she had defeated him. She wanted to take his head, and she was going to get it.

It was then that she chose to stop playing with him as she took his legs out with one swipe across the hamstring, and another across the thigh both strikes utterly destroying the muscle there. Then she was in front of him, staring down with the fury and undeniable surety of course that only a queen was capable of. This hadn't been a mission, this had been retribution, this had been punishment. Amshel bowed his head and transformed back to his human form, the one he prefered. "Why?"

Saya blinked, her rage shining in her eyes as she looked down on the man responsible for so much death. "Why? Because you were the one responsible for the torture and imprisonment of my sister, you were the one responsible for countless deaths caused by the chiropterans of your experiments, you were the one who took my sister from me. I know it's true, don't try to deny it. You were her caretaker and torturer while she was imprisoned in that tower. It was you who chose to experiment with her. You drove my sister mad and then, when I released her and failed to look after her as I should have you exploited her madness for your own ends. Now take my judgement," her voice echoed down at him, her blade swiping across his shoulders as her words rang in his ears, ending his life.

Joel sat at the table in his conference room looking to his left, where Julia and Kai sat, then to his right where David and Louis Sat, then finally across from him where Saya and Diva sat, hand still linked together he noticed, flanked by Haji and Riku to Saya's right and Solomon to Diva's left. Neither Karl James, others of Diva's chevaliers, hadn't taken it well when they was told Saya would no longer be a threat to Diva and the sister's were making up. Both had gone on similarly self-destructive paths leaving Saya no choice but to kill them, their crystals now making up the pommel of Saya's blade. the only of Diva's chevaliers to survive was Solomon as it turned out the one called Nathan wasn't her chevalier at all. He was the twins' mother's chevalier.

If someone had told the twenty-something Joel he had been that the Red and the Blue queens would reconcile and Saya would kill the true threat to humanity in one Amshel Goldsmith, the younger him would have laughed the person out of his office before he'd ordered them confined to the brig for psychiatric evaluation. Still, that was certainly what had happened. The twins, and their assorted chevaliers, were on the Red Shield Headquarters yacht to tell everyone what the queens had decided and then presumably would leave, it was nearly the time for the two twins to sleep.

All he could think was how glad he was that Amshel's plan, as it had been revealed to him, had never finished.

A/N: Saya's speed flicker is not the combat blur thing they show the chevalier's (and her while she tries to stab Amshel in the Opera House before Haji diverts her and stabs the man himself) it's the instant vanish and reappearance that Solomon and Nathan seem to be capable of. Amshel even does it while impersonating Liza but only then. I'm unsure why they do the blur in combat, which seems to me to be much slower, but do the flicker only to make a point...

I'm aware that Amshel put up a lot better of a fight against Haji in the Opera House but I'm operating on a couple assumptions for this.

1. Queen's are inherrently the most dangerous of the species, especially when allowing their instincts to guide them.

2. Saya had never shown she was capable of fighting as a queen should, the only instance she ever used chiropteran speed being in the Opera House where she was weak from her body beginning to go into her long sleep. This means that Amshel would have been caught flatfooted and I don't think a Saya this pissed off is about to stop long enough to let him recover.

3. Saya was really, really, pissed.


End file.
